


In Vino Veritas

by osprey_archer



Category: Garrow's Law
Genre: Drunkenness, Gen, Unrequited Crush
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-26
Updated: 2013-05-26
Packaged: 2017-12-13 00:19:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/817741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/osprey_archer/pseuds/osprey_archer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Melancholy, indeed, should be diverted by every means but drinking." - Samuel Johnson</p><p>The night after their duel, Silvester takes Garrow a bottle of brandy. The visit doesn't go as well as he hoped.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Vino Veritas

The evening after their duel, a half-soused Silvester tottered his way to Garrow’s rooms. 

If he had been quite sober enough to inquire after his own motivations for the visit, he would have told himself that he wanted a gloat. But he’d already had a fine gloat with his Oxford friends, who bought him round after round of drinks at the club to congratulate him for puncturing that upstart Garrow. They howled with laughter as Silvester recounted the duel: Garrow’s last minute cowardice in refusing to fight, and Silvester’s insistence on shooting him anyway, just to teach him a lesson. 

Thompson and Fox-Seton insisted on acting it out. “He didn’t actually shriek like a wild boar when I shot him,” Silvester informed them, and gave a hiccup. Only his third glass of port, and already he was a little sick. “He bore it almost like a gentleman.” 

“Better than you’re bearing your port,” Thompson said, sitting beside him and slinging a half-throttling arm around his neck. “Poor Silvie.”

Silvester hated that nickname. But they would only call him Silvie more often if he complained. 

Silvester left soon after. He meant to go home; but as soon as he left the club, the cool night air eased his headache, and he thought, with a sudden uncommon clarity, _I should go see Garrow._

And why not? He would apologize, perhaps. Men sometimes became friends after duels: it was a gentlemanly thing to do. Silvester could explain to him. Perhaps Garrow was humbled enough to appreciate Silvester’s advice as he ought. 

Not likely. Silvester went back into the club and bought a bottle of the most expensive brandy they had. Apologies and advice, Garrow might scorn, but Garrow could not refuse _that_. 

The gift seemed especially apropos when he reached Garrow’s rooms and smelt the stench of cheap gin through the door. Silvester wrinkled his nose. “Good Lord, does he think he’s a common fishmonger, to be drinking that slop?” he asked; he had a habit of blurting things out when he was drunk. 

(And when he was sober. He couldn’t bear to let a witty observation go unvoiced. One had to remind people one had a razor tongue; it kept them on their toes and at a distance.)

“Silvester,” said Garrow, his quiet voice a little slurred. Even through the door Silvester could hear the annoyance in Garrow’s voice. “Why are you here?” 

“To bring you better drink,” Silvester said. “Finest brandy. I only meant to shoot you, not to force you to blind yourself with bad gin.” 

Silence. Silvester considered asking for permission, then simply pushed open the door instead. 

Garrow sat in his shirtsleeves at his desk, staring into a tumbler of gin with the dull look of a man who cannot decide if it is worth it to drink himself insensible to numb the pain. Good lord, how could the man prepare his cases with his desk such a mess? The whole room, in fact, looked rather like a scene from Hogarth, as if Garrow had flung things about in a fit of rage. 

What a scene _that_ would have been to tell Thompson and Fox-Seton about: Garrow’s rage unleashing his ill-breeding, even moreso than when he stupidly challenged Silvester to a duel. 

A duel, over a silly gibe. Silvester still could not understand. Men said worse things to each other every day at Oxford. 

Garrow lifted his head from his contemplation of his gin glass. “Did I ask you in?” he asked. 

It was not a hostile question, but puzzled. Garrow was so drunk that he couldn’t remember. 

“ _Qui tacet consentit,_ ” said Silvester. He placed bottle of brandy on Garrow’s cluttered desk and sat on the desk corner next to it. “He who keeps silent, consents.” 

Garrow scowled. “I am not wholly ignorant of Latin.”

“I didn’t want to force you to ask if you didn’t happen to remember the phrase, lacking an Oxford education as you do,” Silvester drawled. He picked up Garrow’s glass and turned it, inspecting it in the light of Garrow’s single smoking candle. “As your miserable taste in alcohol and dreadful dueling skills show.” 

Garrow glared. “If you have no business here but to bother me, Silvester, I think you can do that quite as well in court tomorrow,” Garrow said. “Leave.” He lurched to his feet, and Silvester stood too: for Garrow was a good deal taller than Silvester, stronger, the sort of fellow who would have been welcomed on an Oxford cricket squad, and Garrow’s insistence on that farce of a duel showed how much some part of him wanted to hurt Silvester. 

But Garrow’s legs or his gin-fuddled head wouldn’t hold him. He stumbled, and he would have fallen if Silvester had not caught him. 

“Steady on, Garrow,” Silvester said. Garrow attempted another step, and seemed to waver, about to fall. “Steady on!” And he heaved Garrow back, so Garrow fell again into his chair, and pressed his good hand to his face. 

In the candlelight Silvester could see through the thin linen shirt to the bandages wrapped around the gunshot wound on Garrow’s arm. Without his courtroom wig, his face scrunched in on itself with pain, Garrow looked sad and young, and Silvester felt a moment’s guilt for shooting him. 

No; none of that. Pity was a fool’s game. Garrow had needed a lesson, and Silvester had come here to remind him of it. 

And Garrow provided him the perfect opening. “Don’t you lecture me too,” Garrow said. “She told me already.” 

“Lady Sarah?” Silvester said. “I should say she - ”

“You have no right to say her - ” Garrow began. 

“I should say she does,” Silvester repeated, talking over him. “Your insistence on a duel has blackened Lady Sarah’s name far more effectively than anything I could ever have said. You might as well have pasted up broadsides declaring your adultery: no one would insist on duelling for a lady he didn’t love.”

Garrow glared at him, his eyes red-rimmed - with drink or...weeping? Oh, serve Garrow right for falling in love with someone so far above him. Garrow’s eyes filled briefly with tears, but he turned away, blinking swiftly, eyelashes gleaming in the candlelight, and the tears were gone.

Silvester had learned in his first term of school never to cry. His second term, he had learned to press hurt and anger into disdain; and his third, he had mastered an acid tongue. Even if the other boys were taller and stronger and came from better families, they respected and feared him for that. 

“Why are you _here_ , Silvester?” Garrow asked again. “To annoy me, as usual?” 

He sounded actually hurt, and Silvester was surprised. But of course Garrow didn’t know that the new boy must always be tested and tormented, must prove himself worthy before he was accepted into the fold: he hadn’t been to Eton. 

Not that anyone would have teased him at Eton, tall and handsome and so bloody sure of himself. One could imagine his friends singing “He’s a jolly good fellow” at him, possibly at midnight below his window, and scattering when he tossed a pitcher of water at them. 

“Go away,” said Garrow, and abruptly he put his head down on his desk. 

Silvester was annoyed. He snatched up the bottle of brandy - he’d had the foresight to have the bartender pull the cork back at the club - and poured two fingers into Garrow’s empty glass. “I brought you brandy,” he said. “The drink of gentlemen.” He set the glass next to Garrow’s hand. “Go on then. Drink to your health.” 

Garrow lifted his head to stare at Silvester, then let it fall back to the desk. His skull thunked hollowly on the wood. “You missed my heart, so you mean to aid me in drinking myself to death?”

“Oh, Garrow,” Silvester said. He settled himself on the corner of Garrow’s desk again. “I don’t want you dead. I didn’t even want to duel with you, you fool.”

“Why not?” said Garrow, and he sounded absolutely baffled. 

Silvester was just as baffled, and he hated that feeling. “Why would I? I don’t want you dead. The Old Bailey would be so much less entertaining without you.”

“Entertaining,” Garrow said. He drew the glass of brandy to him and drained it without lifting his head. He spilled half of it on the table. A wild drunken giggle bubbled out of him. “Entertaining! A pity you did not think of that before you shot me.” The drunken giggle overtook him again. It lifted the hairs on Silvester’s arms. “Entertaining.” Garrow sat up suddenly, and almost fell out of his chair. “The law is not a cricket match,” said Garrow. “Nor an opera.”

“Oh but it is,” said Silvester. “We all play our parts, Garrow, and then we take our bows.” 

“No, it’s not,” said Garrow, and his voice rose. “The defendants are not - not going to put their manacles in a prop box and, and go safely home after they’ve wept on the stand. It’s their lives - they go back to their cells or to the gallows or - and that’s what’s so entertaining to you; just as it _entertained_ you to shoot me.” 

For a moment, Silvester’s hard-won clever tongue deserted him. A thin fog of drink still hung in his head, and Garrow’s words pierced it, as painful as morning light after a drunken night. 

Silvester thrust it away. “Dear me,” he said. “Save the oratory for the Bailey, Garrow. The crowd will appreciate it, at least.” He took up his bottle of brandy. It slipped in his hands. “I will see you there tomorrow. Do _try_ not to disgrace yourself, Garrow.” 

But that night, sitting before his fire and staring into his brandy snifter with much the same dull stare that Garrow had favored on his gin, Silvester knew a painful truth. Oxford man or not, Garrow was one of the finest men he knew: and though his bullet had only grazed Garrow’s arm, in insisting on taking his shot after Garrow had shown mercy, Silvester had mortally wounded any chance they had of friendship. 

***

Garrow did not remember, perhaps, their drunken talk; for when they met at the Old Bailey, he said, “I have heard of cases where the life and death dance of the duel often leads to new respect, even affection or deep friendship.”

The sneering remarks that usually crowded at the end of Silvester’s tongue abruptly died. He found his mouth was dry, and the hope that he had thought he had drowned the night before arose again. “Apparently this is so,” he said, eyes flickering to Garrow’s face. 

“This,” said Garrow, “is not one of those cases.”

And hope curled into disdain.


End file.
